Is there a decrease in violence in India?

According to Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropologist at Stanford University, violence has shifted to the “center stage of Indian public life.”

He questioned why common Indians appeared to “tacitly accept, or actively join” in acts of public violence. Prof. Hansen stated in his book The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics from 2021 that this development “signals a profound problem, a deformity, and pathology that may pose a threat to the future of democracy.”

Two political scientists with bases in the US, Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, disagree. They contend that widespread violence has decreased in India in their forthcoming book, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State. In other words, compared to the preceding two decades, “aggregate levels of violence in India, both public and private, have decreased in the first two decades of this century.”